Tens Of Thousands Of Illegal Alien Kids Missing On Harris’ Watch

Vice President Kamala Harris was so upset on Election Night 2016 that she polished off a family-sized bag of nacho cheese Doritos. While she was overjoyed in her U.S. Senate victory, Harris was verklempt by Donald Trump’s presidential election triumph. 

“I did not share one chip with anybody. Not even [second gentleman] Doug [Emhoff]. I just watched the TV with utter shock and dismay,” the Democratic Party’s anointed presidential candidate confessed last week in a fundraising email. 

Is the old “Border Czar” shocked and dismayed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Inspector General’s Management Alert showing the Biden-Harris administration has lost track of up to several hundred thousand illegal immigrant children, many at risk of being victims of “trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor”? 

No doubt Harris is too busy this week yucking it up at her Democratic National Committee coronation in Chicago, feeling all the “good vibes.” But if Harris stopped and thought about just these tragic results of her border failures, she might have to down a few bags of Party Size Doritos and perhaps a box or two of Chardonnay to deal with her feelings. Of course, the horrors trafficked children face deserve a much more serious response, but it seems Harris is incapable of serious responses to serious problems.

Lost Children

The IG’s Management Alert dated Aug. 19 scolded the administration for losing track of more than 32,000 unaccompanied children between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, the majority on President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris’ watch. In addition, the report notes that ICE has failed to serve notices to appear (NTAs) in court to nearly 300,000 children, who therefore may be lost to government tracking: “As of May 2024, ICE had not served NTAs on more than 291,000 UCs who therefore do not yet have an immigration court date.”

The 32,000 children ICE knows it lost have failed to appear for their immigration court hearings. It’s a conservative estimate. They come to the border without parents or guardians and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is supposed to find sponsors for them in the United States while they await immigration hearings.

Yet, as the Washington Times reported on Tuesday, HHS “lost track of tens of thousands of them after the children and sponsors stopped replying.” The alert shows Biden’s Immigration and Customs Service (ICE), the Department Homeland Security agency responsible for deportation hearings, has repeatedly failed to follow up. 

“More than 90,000 of these UCs [foreign children] without NTAs crossed the border in 2021 and still do not have a date to appear in court,” says the inspector general alert. In every ICE location the inspector general’s team visited, ICE enforcement officers couldn’t serve these notices to all unaccompanied children the location was responsible for, because they couldn’t find all of them. One ICE location visited couldn’t account for 84 percent of the illegally present alien children for which it was responsible.

The more than 291,000 unaccompanied children who haven’t been served NTAs in the last four fiscal years don’t even have a scheduled court date. The report notes that the number of children who did not appear for their court date likely would have been significantly higher had ICE issued notice to appear papers to the 291,000 not placed into removal proceedings.

Not issuing notices to appear limits ICE’s opportunities to verify the minors’ safety, the report notes. The massive lack of these notices and subsequent court dates suggests the federal government doesn’t know where many of these nearly 300,000 migrant children are, and whether they’re safe or trafficked.

“By not issuing NTAs to all UCs [unaccompanied foreign children], ICE limits its chances of having contact with UCs when they are released from HHS’ custody, which reduces opportunities to verify their safety. Without an ability to monitor the location and status of UCs, ICE has no assurance UCs are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor,” the alert states. 

Inspector General Joseph Cuffari urged U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to “take immediate action to ensure the safety of [Unaccompanied Children] residing in the United States.” 

The Border Czar’s Big Problem 

The report is just the latest documentation of disastrous Biden-Harris open border policies. Over the past three and a half years, more than 8.1 million illegal immigrants have flooded over the southern border, with approximately 10 million illegal alien encounters nationwide, according to conservative estimates by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Senate Republicans have called on the Biden administration’s Office of Refugee Resettlement to reform its policies on unaccompanied alien children, part of which allows the separated kids to be sent to “unvetted, potentially criminal sponsors.”

“…ORR does not even consider a sponsor’s criminal record, current illegal drug use, history of abuse or neglect, or other child welfare concerns ‘necessarily disqualifying to potential sponsorship.’…  In effect, ORR accepts a sponsor’s representations almost entirely on face value,” 38 senators wrote in a letter in December to the Health and Human Services agency. 

Early in his presidency, Biden made Harris his “Border Czar,” a title the accomplice media adopted and embraced until it became uncomfortable for Harris as Democrats’ presidential candidate. It’s uncomfortable because Biden’s No. 2 has been a colossal failure at dealing with a disaster that she helped create.

So, when she became the presumptive presidential nominee, the administration and corporate media outlets began emphasizing Harris’ idiotic mission to “address the root causes of migration.” While the vice president was loathe to visit the border, it should have been easy enough to determine the root causes of migration, especially when the architect of open borders called on asylum seekers to “surge” the border while campaigning for the White House.  

“We could afford to take in a heartbeat another two million,” Biden said during an event in August 2019. One chaotic border crisis later, Harris and the Democrats are trying to — with the accomplice media’s help — revise the past and position themselves as secure border hawks in this election. They’re lying. They’ve done that a lot. 

Elections and egregiously bad border policies (putting politics before national security) have consequences. Americans are paying the price in so many ways for the damage Biden and his team have wrought. And voters know who to blame. 

Polls consistently show the border crisis is a top issue for voters and they trust Trump to clean up the mess much more than the candidate who helped make it. But Harris and the Democrats are trying to hide in plain sight their abysmal record on the border, national security, and public safety, with a tougher-talking platform that, according to leftist publication Truthout, “evinces a disturbing rightward lurch for Democrats on immigration and policing.”  

If the overwhelming majority of voters concerned about illegal immigration aren’t fooled by the phony Kamala Harris makeover, the far-left vice president will be eating her feelings, fingers coated in nacho cheese powder, as she stares down a near-empty bag of Doritos and a resounding victory for Donald Trump.

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.